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Month: February 2020

Admin? The stick of creative work.

I filled in a business health check and one of the questions was how you cope with admin.

It’s the dread of most businesses – it has to be done, someone has to do it, and sadly, being a creative doesn’t mean you can get away with ignoring those excel spreadsheets, accounts packages, quotation and estimation work, and keeping track of those expenses, invoices, subscription renewals and travel receipts.

You can run, but you can’t hide and your next quarterly VAT might well turn into a nightmare orchestrated by Mr. Admin. I’ve been there, believe me, and it’s honestly far more ugly and stressful to pull a late nighter trawling through email histories and getting accounts in order than managing it a little bit at a time.

I’ve developed my own little rule of thumb… (love that expression). I can’t start creative work until the admin is done. That’s on 4 out of 5 working days. On the 5th day, it’s the other way around. It’s creative first, and potentially no admin at all (unless there’s print buying to be done as part of a creative brief).

This may sound petty and not suit everyone, but I need a clear head to think outside the box and worrying about that email I need to reply to will just hang over me and stop me from thinking freely.

And doing a little bit every morning first means there isn’t much to catch up with.

It also allows me to happily go into what my colleague Steve calls monk mode. In monk mode you just focus, ignore everything else, email, chat, news of another calamity, and you buckle down to concentrate on what you’re working on, nothing else.

I love being in monk mode. It takes the guilt out of not reacting to every inbound query in whichever form whilst I’m dedicated to what I’m working on and usually results in a much faster output than trying to do too many tasks at once. There has been a time when we all functioned without instant responses, and it’s ok to wait a couple of hours for a reply…

I’m obviously bound to urgent deadline requirements and sometimes it all goes out the window and I need to do an after hours catch up, but generally, by changing my attitude towards those more technical tasks and seeing them as the stick that gets me my yummy creative carrot, we’ve become quite good friends (Mr Admin and me).

What is a masterpage in PowerPoint?

It’s also called a slide master in Microsoft PowerPoint, and it’s basically the slide that sits above all the other slides and as such it controls the visual elements of the theme, such as the layout, background, colours, fonts, and also where these are positioned on any slides you create within that theme.

That way, you can create a consistent look and feel for your presentation.

Beware, there are limitations to how clever the slide master is compared to other publishing software with the same concept of master pages (such as InDesign). In PowerPoint you can’t position elements on the slide master to be on a certain layer (above or below) in relation to elements on the actual slides. But those little niggles are more for your graphic designer to fight with 😂 and hopefully your template will be set up so you can easily work with it to create a consistent look for your brand material.

You can read more about slide masters here at the Microsoft Support site.

Screen cap from Microsoft office support.

master pages, master slide, PowerPoint

ED Awards Email

Always say never! Oh, never mind…

This morning, something dropped in my mail box and I had to look twice, three times even and check my previous emails to see if it really could be true. Did Gmail and Unibox have a serious issue with their font translation? Or is the font of choice for the European Design Awards entry newsletter really Comic Sans – in capitals?!?!!?

In a mild state of shock and disbelief (obviously there are more pressing issues out there than what font an awards organisation chooses to pop in their email header design), but I had to check it out with WhatTheFont and it really seemed to be Comic Sans… Hmmmm.

And then it hit me. Never say never! You can laugh now at just how dumb a moment I’ve had this morning. Their little visual hook was just perfect to get me, obviously gullible and opinionated when it comes to branding and design, to keep reading… so well done, mission accomplished!

My only criticism, I guess, is the fact that the newsletter and their social media look so different from their actual web home page. I think that’s what threw me. It was only when I saw their Instagram that the penny dropped and I could see the method in the madness.

So, after all this, and hanging my head in shame for doubting their taste or typographic sanity, I can only thank them for highlighting once again how critical good typography is for design, no matter which media.

With the amazing tools available today for web, email and obviously print, typography is sadly still very much an afterthought for SME brands with a ‘that will do’ attitude when looking at their marketing and brand collateral.